Vehicle doors are typically swung between fully closed and fully opened positions to permit ingress and egress of passengers to and from a vehicle. A door check system is typically employed to provide one or more intermediate holding positions for the door for convenience. Traditional door check systems suffer from a number of deficiencies, however. For example, the intermediate positions provided by the door check system can sometimes be inconvenient in the sense that they either don't give a vehicle user sufficient room to enter or leave the vehicle, or they are positioned so far outward that the door is at risk of hitting a door from an adjacent parked vehicle (e.g. in a mall parking lot). Furthermore, the door check system may be configured to permit easy use of the door by a certain segment of the general population, but the door may be difficult to use by a different segment of the general population. Additionally, there are numerous situations in which the door can unintendedly swing open and hit an adjacent vehicle.
The patent literature contains some proposed door check systems that permit a user to select where a door is stopped. Such systems tend to be very limited in their capabilities, however, and in some instances can be very large, intruding significantly on the already restricted amount of space available inside a vehicle door. It would be beneficial to provide a door check system that at least partially addresses one or more of the problems described above or other problems associated with door check systems of the prior art.